i wonder about the psychological role of diagnosis
i've heard this pattern before. diagnosis gives you…absolution?
you're still the SAME EXACT person; but now there's a label in the DSM for the kind of person you are, so you no longer hate yourself
a curious phenomenon
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in my case i refuse to get diagnosed bc i hate the mental health establishment where i'm from, but also yea getting a sense of the pattern of a thing allows me to navigate it with less confusion. knowledge is power. i am not the same person than before; I know myself better now
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i've run into a funny pattern where i refuse to use a diagnosis-ey word to describe myself until i have my own alternative model of what it's actually made of so i don't have to use the default one. noticed myself doing this with both "depression" and "ADHD" recently
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I wish more people used their own words like this tbh. yes it's more work, but you avoid a lot of the pitfalls of going with an off-the-shelf solution that's full of all sorts of janky bullshit
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I continue to believe that one of the most powerful things you can do is figure out a new way to describe things. once again I am talking about word magic
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it is a lot more work yeah. i rejected "depression" as a label as far back as ~2016 and it's taken this whole time to feel comfortable casually using it 😅 and i had to refactor its meaning substantially multiple times
idk if i could have articulated what i wanted to reject about it but i had the vague sense that i was being asked to take on an identity i didn't want
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like even now i'll say "i go in and out of depressive phases" and not "i am (sometimes) a depressed person" or even "i (sometimes) have depression," i just sort of reject the entire idea of "depression" as a "condition." to me it's a strategy that the bodymind adopts sometimes
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